The NUC Executive Secretary, Prof. Julius Okojie, stated this during the opening ceremony of a workshop on West and Central African Research and Education Network Monitoring and Measurement

The National Universities Commission on Monday said it required N28bn from the Federal Government and other stakeholders to complete the second phase of the Nigerian Research and Education Network project.

The NUC Executive Secretary, Prof. Julius Okojie, stated this during the opening ceremony of a workshop on West and Central African Research and Education Network Monitoring and Measurement.

He said, “What is delaying the second phase is that it will cost about N28bn. We want a big leap. We can share video conferencing, teleconferencing and it is not just a pedestal research.”

Okojie said that NgREN, among other things, would provide cheaper bandwidth for member institutions as well as network services and application such as identity federation, e-content, hosting, network security and bandwidth management.

He regretted that researchers in the nation’s universities were not doing well due to poor learning resources.

Okojie added, “Over a period of 30 years, we have lost the research culture. Now, we are trying to build capacity everywhere. Once the Ph.D holders and professors leave the system, it is difficult to bring capacity; so over a period, we discovered that we did not even have research facilities.

“Government in the past five years have invested massively in these areas through TETFUND and Needs Assessment implementation programme, building structures for research, teaching and learning. If you do not have equipment you cannot do research.

“We suddenly realised that we are not doing well in terms of sharing information and resources.”

There is no better platform than through NgREN; this is an ICT platform where you can inter-connect many organisations that have a common goal, ours is on research and teaching.”